• Wenchao Li, Yun Wang, Haidong Zhang, Huamin Qu

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Animated visualization is becoming increasingly popular as a compelling way to illustrate changes in time series data. However, the time-consuming nature makes it difficult to maintain the viewer's focus for the entire animation. Viewers are likely to become bored and distracted during the ever-changing animated visualization. Informed by the role of foreshadowing that builds the expectation in film and literature, we introduce visual foreshadowing to improve the engagement of animated visualizations. Specifically, we propose two categories of visual foreshadowing to engage the audience while watching the animation. To demonstrate our approach, we built a proof-of-concept animated visualization authoring tool that incorporates the visual foreshadowing techniques with various styles. Our user study indicates the effectiveness of our foreshadowing techniques on improving engagement for animated visualization.

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The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. This work was supported in part by a grant from Microsoft Research Asia.